XFX 8600GT and 8600 GTS XXX Edition Video Cards

Overclocking

***Warning*** The 8600 GT does not include the power header of the GTS model and although you may be able to overclock the GT to the speeds you see below, similar to the GTS, you’ll be pulling more power from the motherboard than the 75 watts it can supply. This could cause damage to your video card and/or the motherboard that is not covered by any warranty.

In our overclocking adventures we thought wed start off with NVIDIAs nTune software but no matter what we did the card would not pass the GPU test required by the software before applying the speeds. Even running the test at stock speeds would cause a failed error. Determined to get more performance out of our cards we decided to give ATI Tool a shot and it worked like a charm! Knowing that the 8600 GT was just a lower clocked variant of the 8600 GTS we had high hopes for our low cost beast. With frequencies at 620MHz core and 1.6GHz memory we set ATI Tool to find the max overclock for the card.

We were pleasantly surprised to find our 8600 GT was able to run perfectly stable at 715MHz core and 1.72GHz memory! The core speed was close to that of the 8600 GTS but memory speed was a bit off so we ran a few tests to see how close in performance we were.

3D Mark

X3:Reunion

Rainbow Six: Vegas

For five minutes with ATI Tool we’ve got an 8600 GT that’s performs just like the more expensive 8600 GTS XXX! Even overclocking to just the GPU core speeds of the reference 8600 GTS will give you a noticeable performance increase, will save you a bit of cash, and wont endanger your video card or motherboard! If your asking why we don’t have numbers for the 8600 GTS in overclocking it’s because XFX has done a great job getting every last drop of performance from 8600 GTS XXX, increasing the overclock on either the memory more than just a few MHz would result in artifacts.